Now, however, this threatening homogeneity has been loosening up, and an alternative is beginning to break into the repressive continuum. This alternative is not so much a different road to socialism as an emergence of different goals and values, different aspirations in the men and women who resist and deny the massive exploitative power of corporate capitalism even in its most comfortable and liberal realizations. The Great Refusal takes a variety of forms.

Herbert Marcuse, "Preface," An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. vii.

In this transformation, the Women’s Liberation Movement becomes a radical force to the degree to which it transcends the entire sphere of aggressive needs and performances, the entire social organization and division of functions. In other words, the movement becomes radical to the degree to which it aims, not only at equality within the job and value structure of the established society (which would be the equality of dehumanization) but rather at a change in the structure itself (the basic demands of equal opportunity, equal pay, and release from full-time household and child care are a prerequisite).

Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” in Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss, eds., The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, Boston: Beacon Press, 2007, p. 246.

[Note: This essay, "Nature and Revolution," first appeared in Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.]

Marcuse, on the other hand, constantly advocated the "Great Refusal" as the proper political response to any form of irrational repression, and indeed this seems to be at least the starting point for political activism in the contemporary era: refusal of all forms of oppression and domination, relentless criticism of all policies that impact negatively on working people and progressive social programs, and militant opposition to any and all acts of aggression against Third World countries. Indeed, in an era of "positive thinking," conformity, and Yuppies who "go for it," it seems that Marcuse's emphasis on negative thinking, refusal, and opposition provides at least a starting point and part of a renewal of radical politics in the contemporary era.

Douglas Kellner, Illuminations http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell13a.htm

As I understand it, critical theory is a normative reflection that is historically and socially contextualized. Critical theory rejects as illusory the effort to construct a universal normative system insulated from a particular society. Normative reflection must begin from historically specific circumstances because there is but what is, the given, the situated interest in justice, from which to start. Reflecting from within a particular social context, good normative theorizing cannot avoid social and political description and explanation. Without social theory, normative reflection is abstract, empty, and unable to guide criticism with a practical interest in emancipation. Unlike positivist social theory, however, which separates social facts from values, and claims to be value-neutral, critical theory denies that social theory must accede to the given. Social description and explanation must be critical, that is, aim to evaluate the given in normative terms. Without such a critical stance, many questions about what occurs in a society and why, who benefits and who is harmed, will not be asked, and social theory is liable to reaffirm and reify the given social reality.

Critical theory presumes that the normative ideals used to criticize a society are rooted in experience of and reflection on that very society, and that norms can come from nowhere else. But what does this mean, and how is it possible for norms to be both socially based and measures of society? Normative reflection arises from hearing a cry of suffering or distress, or feeling distress oneself. The philosopher is always socially situated, and if the society is divided by oppressions, she either reinforces or struggles against them. With an emancipatory interest, the philosopher apprehends given social circumstances not merely in contemplation but with passion: the given is experienced in relation to desire. Desire, the desire to be happy, creates the distance, the negation, that opens the space for criticism of what is. This critical distance does not occur on the basis of some previously discovered rational ideas of the good and the just. On the contrary, the ideas of the good and the just arise from the desiring negation that action brings to what is given.

Critical theory is a mode of discourse which projects normative possibilities unrealized but felt in a particular given social reality. Each social reality presents its own unrealized possibilities, experienced as lacks and desires. Norms and ideals arise from the yearning that is an expression of freedom: it does not have to be this way, it could be otherwise. Imagination is the faculty of transforming the experience of what is into a projection of what could be, the faculty that frees thought to form ideals and norms.

Herbert Marcuse describes this genesis of ideals from an experience of the possibilities desired but unrealized in the given:

Now, there is a large class of concepts—we dare say, the philosophically relevant concepts—where the quantitative relation between the universal and the particular assumes a qualitative aspect, where the abstract, universal seems to designate potentialities in a concrete, historical sense. However "man," "nature," "justice," "beauty," or "freedom" may be defined, they synthesize experiential contents into ideas which transcend their particular realizations as something to be surpassed, overcome. Thus the concept of beauty comprehends all the beauty not yet realized; the conception of freedom all the liberty not yet attained.

…

Such universals thus appear as conceptual instruments for understanding the particular conditions of things in light of their potentialities. They are historical and supra-historical; they conceptualize the stuff of which the experienced world consists, and they conceptualize it with a view of its possibilities, in the light of their actual limitation, suppression, and denial. Neither the experience nor the judgment is private. The philosophic concepts are formed and developed in the consciousness of a general condition in a historical continuum; they are elaborated from an individual position within a specific society. The stuff of thought is historical stuff—no matter how abstract, general, or pure, it may become in philosophic or scientific theory.

{Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Society, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964, pp. 214-215.}

Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 5-6.

This new social order requires an alteration of the instinctual structure of human beings in oppressive and repressive societies. The alteration of society and of the human instincts must occur simultaneously in a dialectical relationship. That is, one does not necessarily precede the other. What is required for the actualization of such a vision is a new orientation in thought, a new model for education, and the development of more of what Marcuse called catalyst groups. We must continue to struggle in hope that the specter of liberation that haunts Western philosophy and society will eventually dwell among us in the flesh.

Arnold L. Farr, Critical Theory and Democratic Vision: Herbert Marcuse and Recent Liberation Philosophies, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, p. 178.

Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.

Herbert Marcuse, The Listener [magazine], 1978.

… to study Critical Theory as a way of escaping the isolation of disciplines within universities and as a point of struggle within the university system and trying to make link-ups with alternatives in the working class movement at large.

Rick Roderick, "The Emancipatory Challenge of Critical Theory," Video Interview of Rick Roderick by Ann Buttimer at University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 1987.

The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.

At the beginning of the fascist era, Walter Benjamin wrote:

Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p. 257. [the closing portion of the book]